Music has powerful (and visible) effects on the brain

It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people’s favorites do in theirs.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Music has powerful (and visible) effects on the brain

It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people’s favorites do in theirs.

more…

> seeing that, and ‘dislike’ looks different than ‘like’ and much different than ‘favorite.’

> Those fMRI scans showed a consistent pattern: The listeners’ preferences, not the type of music they were listening to, had the greatest impact on brain connectivity

What does this mean?

Does this research invalidate what I was hypothesising earlier, that familiarity matters but genre doesn’t. ie. that everybody’s taste in music is really the same? Or is it that all they are measuring is familiarity, rather than music?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Music has powerful (and visible) effects on the brain

It doesn’t matter if it’s Bach, the Beatles, Brad Paisley or Bruno Mars. Your favorite music likely triggers a similar type of activity in your brain as other people’s favorites do in theirs.

more…

Images from technical article

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep06130

Or does this article confirm my hypothesis, given similar reactions to all music genres?

Listening to a favorite song alters the connectivity between auditory brain areas and the hippocampus, a region responsible for memory and social emotion consolidation. Given that musical preferences are uniquely individualized phenomena and that music can vary in acoustic complexity and the presence or absence of lyrics, the consistency of our results was unexpected. These findings may explain why comparable emotional and mental states can be experienced by people listening to music that differs as widely as Beethoven and Eminem.